Personal Histories with Social Media
Does Social Media promote narcissism?
A cautionary tale by John Lindensmith:
The first time social media and I were really intimate was when I was about the age of sixteen and my girlfriend at the time decided I NEEDED to start a Xanga so I could share all my personal thoughts and feelings with strangers on the internet. Being sixteen, this sounded like a great idea to me. After all, I met my girlfriend on a message board dedicated to some indy tween horror film entitled Hangman’s Curse. If I could date a stranger via webcam, MSN messenger, and internet forums; why not further detach myself from the fleshy-space by projecting all my thoughts and feelings into the World Wide Web?
So I did. I started a blog on Xanga called The Bad Place where I mostly whined about my girlfriend, how unfair life was, and made “jokes” about murdering whichever group of people I thought deserved the pointy end of a blade. I was a real class act. Then my “girlfriend” broke up with me, I had a nervous breakdown, shut down my blog, and quickly returned to Xangaland in the form of The Church of Fat, a second blog I started October 23, 2005. Unbeknownst to me, this blog would gain a huge following of insecure, hateful, xenophobic misanthropes and fat emo girls who wanted to bone me. The reason I attracted such followers was because my content, again, consisted mostly of hateful, expletive-laced rants against humanity. At one point, I had up to sixteen thousand hits a week, was on Xanga’s top ten featured blogs, and had almost 1000 subscribers. (My high school pal, Alyssa Miller, briefly mentions me in her own blog post about social media HERE)
I now see all this hatred for what it really was: insecurity in myself. Looking through my old posts, I’m very glad I am not seventeen years old anymore. For an insecure teenager to be garnered with so much attention is unhealthy. Because I experienced quasi-internet fame (the lowest form of attention one can receive), I became a narcissist, believing every word I typed was gold and that nothing I said was ever wrong. For God’s sake, I was King of Xanga--in reality, a cold, dark, and meaningless corner of the world; but at that age, I thought it was everything. It had become my world. All the comments, all the subscribers, all the attention, all the propositions for sex—it had consumed me, until there was no real me, no real self, just a digital projection of me on the internet: a façade of burning hatred and malice for all things. In reality, I was just scared
Cyber-bullying Bullying: consists of three basic types of abuse; emotional, verbal and physical. Obiously not physical in the instance of cyber-bullying. It is an act of aggression that is intended to hurt another individual intentionally through physical or mental abuse. Cyber-bullying: is the use of electronic information and communication devices such as e-mail, instant messaging, text messages and mobile phones to bully or otherwise harass an individual or group through personal attacks or other means.
Studies show that 25 to 29 percent of teenagers have been bullied through some form social media. Findings also show that the early years of high school seem to have the highest rate of bullying. Who do you think suffers more bullying boys or girls? To find out read this study Bullying
Social Media Addiction An Addiction: May be viewed as a compulsion or a dependency to a certain activity or behavior. It is usually harmful and has a negative outcome. Social Media: An internet-based and user-generated technology that is based on connecting people together. Examples are Facebook, MySpace, Google+, and LinkedIn. Social Media Addict: A person who continuously checks their Facebook or Twitter page and would rather do that then hang out with friends or family.
Personal Histories with Social Media
Does Social Media promote narcissism?
A cautionary tale by John Lindensmith:
The first time social media and I were really intimate was when I was about the age of sixteen and my girlfriend at the time decided I NEEDED to start a Xanga so I could share all my personal thoughts and feelings with strangers on the internet. Being sixteen, this sounded like a great idea to me. After all, I met my girlfriend on a message board dedicated to some indy tween horror film entitled Hangman’s Curse. If I could date a stranger via webcam, MSN messenger, and internet forums; why not further detach myself from the fleshy-space by projecting all my thoughts and feelings into the World Wide Web?
So I did. I started a blog on Xanga called The Bad Place where I mostly whined about my girlfriend, how unfair life was, and made “jokes” about murdering whichever group of people I thought deserved the pointy end of a blade. I was a real class act. Then my “girlfriend” broke up with me, I had a nervous breakdown, shut down my blog, and quickly returned to Xangaland in the form of The Church of Fat, a second blog I started October 23, 2005. Unbeknownst to me, this blog would gain a huge following of insecure, hateful, xenophobic misanthropes and fat emo girls who wanted to bone me. The reason I attracted such followers was because my content, again, consisted mostly of hateful, expletive-laced rants against humanity. At one point, I had up to sixteen thousand hits a week, was on Xanga’s top ten featured blogs, and had almost 1000 subscribers. (My high school pal, Alyssa Miller, briefly mentions me in her own blog post about social media HERE)
I now see all this hatred for what it really was: insecurity in myself. Looking through my old posts, I’m very glad I am not seventeen years old anymore. For an insecure teenager to be garnered with so much attention is unhealthy. Because I experienced quasi-internet fame (the lowest form of attention one can receive), I became a narcissist, believing every word I typed was gold and that nothing I said was ever wrong. For God’s sake, I was King of Xanga--in reality, a cold, dark, and meaningless corner of the world; but at that age, I thought it was everything. It had become my world. All the comments, all the subscribers, all the attention, all the propositions for sex—it had consumed me, until there was no real me, no real self, just a digital projection of me on the internet: a façade of burning hatred and malice for all things. In reality, I was just scared
Cyber-bullying
Bullying: consists of three basic types of abuse; emotional, verbal and physical. Obiously not physical in the instance of cyber-bullying. It is an act of aggression that is intended to hurt another individual intentionally through physical or mental abuse.
Cyber-bullying: is the use of electronic information and communication devices such as e-mail, instant messaging, text messages and mobile phones to bully or otherwise harass an individual or group through personal attacks or other means.
Studies show that 25 to 29 percent of teenagers have been bullied through some form social media. Findings also show that the early years of high school seem to have the highest rate of bullying. Who do you think suffers more bullying boys or girls? To find out read this study Bullying
Social Media Addiction
An Addiction: May be viewed as a compulsion or a dependency to a certain activity or behavior. It is usually harmful and has a negative outcome.
Social Media: An internet-based and user-generated technology that is based on connecting people together. Examples are Facebook, MySpace, Google+, and LinkedIn.
Social Media Addict: A person who continuously checks their Facebook or Twitter page and would rather do that then hang out with friends or family.